Bastard out of Carolina (27 page)

“Just don’t you tell nobody,” I insisted.

“Won’t tell a soul, Bone,” he promised. “Not a soul.” He grinned so wide I had to believe him.

 

That night I slept over at Aunt Raylene’s place. After she was asleep, I snuck out to get the hook. I took it back to my room, pried the chain off, and cleaned and polished it. When it was shiny and smooth, I got in bed and put it between my legs, pulling it back and forth. It made me shiver and go hot at the same time. I had read in one of the paperbacks Daddy Glen hid in the garage about women who pushed stuff up inside them. I held the chain and thought about that, rubbed it against my skin and hummed to myself. I wasn’t like the women in those books, but it felt good to hold that metal, to let those links slip back and forth until they were slippery. I used the lock I had found on the river bank to fasten the chain around my hips. It felt sun-warmed and tingly against my skin, as shiny as the sweat on Uncle Earle’s freckled shoulders, as exciting as the burning light behind my eyes. It was mine. It was safe. Every link on that chain was magic in my hand.

I put my head back and smiled. The chain moved under the sheet. I was locked away and safe. What I really was could not be touched. What I really wanted was not yet imagined. Somewhere far away a child was screaming, but right then, it was not me.

I
carried my hook home in a croker sack with the last of the zucchini and cucumbers from Aunt Raylene’s garden. I didn’t trust Reese enough to risk taking it in the house, so I hid it in one of Mama’s packing boxes tucked up in the rafters over the washing machine. Up there it was safe and out of sight, a talisman against the dark and anything that waited in the dark. It made me stand taller just to know it was there, made me feel as if I had suddenly become magically older, stronger, almost dangerous. I would look up every time I helped Mama with the laundry, look up as if I were lost in thought or dreaming of the future.

“You’ve changed, Bone.” Mama pulled towels and sheets out of the washing machine and dropped them into the basket I was holding.

“No ma’am, not really.” I dropped my head down.

“Yes, you have. I’d say you were even a little taller. You hold your head up more. I can even see your eyes now and then.” Mama grinned at me and dropped the last of the towels in my basket. She had to reach over the machine for her bag of clothespins, an old T-shirt she had sewed closed at the bottom and hung on a coat hanger. While her face was turned, I looked up and made sure my box was still securely in place.

“Reese tell you that Shannon Pearl called?”

I was already going out the door toward the clothesline, but Mama’s words stopped me. “She did?”

“Uh huh. I didn’t talk to her, but Reese said she just asked if you were around. You might think about calling her back.”

“I don’t know, Mama. I don’t know if I should.”

“Well, I an’t telling you that you have to, but you should think about it, Bone. An’t no sense in being hardhearted, and talking to her won’t kill you. She might want to apologize, you know.”

“Yes ma’am.” I started shaking out a sheet to hang it on the line. I didn’t want Mama to see my face. I had no intention of calling Shannon Pearl.

 

Mama never asked why Shannon Pearl and I had quarreled. The only time she mentioned it was when she agreed with Aunt Raylene that it was probably better to stay out of kids’ arguments. I’d walked in on them talking together and knew immediately what they had been discussing, so I turned right around and went back out. Mama had gotten angry when Mrs. Pearl called to tell her that I’d never apologized for taking a swing at Shannon, though not because she thought I should have been made to apologize. Her anger was at my careless stupidity.

“Don’t you know you can put somebody’s eye out, hitting them in the face?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“No reason to be hitting people anyway.”

“No ma’am.”

“Well ...” She looked at me closely. I knew she was waiting for me to say something, but I just kept my eyes on the table. “I don’t know about the Pearls. They should have brought you home right away, ‘stead of making you sit in the car while they went all over everywhere.” She started rummaging through her purse for her cigarettes. “And I don’t know why she’s calling after all this time.”

“No ma’am.” I didn’t want to discuss Shannon Pearl. By now, I was sure, she was lonely for someone to talk to and had gotten her mama to call us.

Mama sighed tiredly. “Well, you just stay out of trouble. I don’t want to be explaining your behavior to other people all the time.”

“No ma’am.”

 

It was just before Thanksgiving that Shannon Pearl called our house and got me on the phone. “I’m not gonna apologize,” she said right away, as if no time at all had passed. Her voice sounded strange after not hearing it for so long.

“I don’t care what you do,” I told her. I held the phone with my shoulder and picked my cuticles.

“Stop that,” Mama said as she went by on her way to the kitchen.

“Yes ma’am,” I said automatically.

“What’s that?” Shannon sounded hopeful.

“I was talking to my mama. Why’d you call me?”

There was a sigh, and then Shannon cleared her throat a couple of times. “Well, I thought I should. No sense us fighting over something so silly, anyway. I bet you can’t even remember what it was about.”

“I remember,” I told her, and my voice sounded cold even to me. For a moment I was ashamed, then angry. Why should I care if I hurt her feelings? Who was she to me?

“My mama said I could call you,” Shannon whispered. “She said I could ask you over this Sunday. We’re gonna have a barbecue for some of Daddy’s people from Mississippi. They’re bringing us some Georgia peaches and some eggshell pecans.”

I bit at my thumbnail and said nothing.

“You could ask your mama if you could come.” Shannon’s voice sounded breathless and desperate, almost squeaky. “If you wanted to,” she added. I wondered what she had said in order to get her mama to agree I could come over. Out on the porch Reese had started shouting at Patsy Ruth.

“You don’t even know how to play this game!”

Why should I go to the Pearls’ house and watch her fat relatives eat themselves sick?

“Mama gave me a record player,” Shannon said suddenly. “I got a bunch of records for it.”

“Yeah?”

“Lots of ’em.” I heard her mother saying something in the background. “I got to go. Are you gonna come?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll think about it.” I hung up the phone and saw Mama was watching me from the kitchen. “Shannon wants me to come over to her house this Sunday. They’re having a barbecue.”

“You want to go?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

Mama nodded and handed me a towel. “Well, come help me. And you be sure and tell me if you’re going before Sunday. I an’t gonna want no surprises on Sunday morning. I might want to spend the whole day in bed, you never can tell.” She smiled, and I hugged her. I loved it when she looked like that. It made the whole house feel warm and safe.

“I might want to go on a trip myself.” Mama slapped my behind lightly. “But I an’t going nowhere till we get these dishes done, girl, and it’s your turn to dry.”

“Yes ma’am.”

 

I didn’t plan to go. I really didn’t. I certainly didn’t call Shannon back, and I didn’t say anything to Mama either. But Sunday afternoon I started walking toward Shannon’s house, carrying Reese’s tin bucket as if I was going hunting for late muscadines. Along the way I shook the wilting gray-green vines that would die off as soon as the first good freeze came. In the movies. people were alwavs swinging from vines like those, but every time Reese or I tried it, we wound up falling on our behinds. Maybe they had a different kind of vines in the forests where they made movies, but then they probably didn’t grow muscadines there.

I hummed as I walked, snatches of Mama’s favorite hymns and mine, alternating between “Somebody Touched Me” and “Oh Sinner Man.” Reese always sang it as “Whoa Sinner Man,” which made Uncle Earle bark out his donkey’s-bray laugh. I missed Earle. We weren’t going to see him until spring. He’d been sent to the county farm for busting a man’s jaw and breaking a window down at the Cracker Blue Cafe. Aunt Alma said he’d gotten into more fights at the farm and a bunch of men had held him down and shaved off all his black hair. I tried to imagine him baldheaded.

“That’ll slow down his womanizing.” Aunt Alma had sounded almost pleased.

“What’s womanizing?” Reese hadn’t learned yet that asking questions when the aunts were talking just got you pushed outside. I’d tried to tell her that if she ever wanted to learn anything, she should just shut up and listen and try to figure it out later.

“What are you doing listening to other people’s business?” Mama had been really angry. “You get out of here, all of you.”

“See what you did.” I’d been righteously indignant. I wasn’t used to being put out with the little kids. “Now we’ll never know why they shaved his head.”

“Oh, I know that already.” Reese smirked and put her arm around Patsy Ruth. “Granny said he tried to cut some fellow’s dick off.”

 

I’d never come up to the Pearls’ house from the back before. I usually came down the road from the Sears Tire Center, but that Sunday I cut through the backyards of the big houses on Tyson Circle and through the parking lot of the Roberts Dairy Drive-In. There were magnolia and flowers all along the back of their property so no one could see that parking lot, and I had to wiggle past the mums that were planted close to their fence.

There were a lot of people there, and they all looked like Pearls. Short, puffy, overdressed men stood around holding massive glasses of tea and grinning at skinny, pale women with pink lipstick and flyaway hair. Little kids were running around over near the driveway, where some big boys were taking turns cranking an ice-cream maker. Two card tables had been set up in addition to the big redwood picnic table Mrs. Pearl was so proud of getting last year. It looked like people had already been eating, but the charcoal grill was still smoldering, and Shannon Pearl was standing beside it looking as miserable as any human being could.

I stood still and watched her. She was fiddling with a long-handled fork, looking over every now and then at the other children. Her face was flushed pink and sweaty, and she looked swollen in her orange-and-white organdy dress. I remembered Mama saying Mrs. Pearl just didn’t know how to dress her daughter.

“She shouldn’t put her in all that embroidery. As fat as that child is, it just makes her look bigger.”

I agreed. Shannon looked like a sausage stuffed in a too-small casing. She also looked like she had been crying. Past the tables, Mrs. Pearl was sitting with half a dozen wispy thin women, two of whom were holding babies.

“Precious. Precious,” I heard someone exclaim in a reedy voice.

“You fat old thing.” One of Shannon’s cousins ran past her and stage-whispered loud in her ear. “You musta eat nothing but pork since you was born. Turned you into the hog you are.” He laughed and ran on. Shannon pulled off her glasses and started cleaning them on her skirt.

“Jesus shit,” I muttered to myself.

I had always suspected that I was the only friend Shannon Pearl had in the world. That was part of what made me feel so mean and evil around her, knowing that I didn’t really care enough about her to be her best friend. But hearing her cousin talk to her that way brought back the first time I’d met her, the way I’d loved her stubborn pride, the righteous rage she turned on her tormentors. She didn’t look righteous at that moment. She looked tired and hurt and ashamed. Her face made me feel sick and angry, and guilty about her all over again.

I kicked at the short wooden fence for a moment and then swung one leg up to climb over. All right, she was a little monster, but she was my friend, and the kind of monster I could understand. Twenty feet away from me, Shannon sniffed and reached for the can of lighter fluid by the grill. She hadn’t even seen me.

 

Afterward, people kept asking me what happened.

“Where were you,” Sheriff Cole said for the third or fourth time. “And what exactly did you see?” He never gave me a chance to tell him. Maybe because it was hard to hear over Mrs. Pearl’s screaming.

“Uh huh, and where were you?” He kept looking over his shoulder toward the grill and the sputtering fat fire.

I knew he hadn’t heard a word I said. But Mrs. Pearl had. She had heard me clear, and she flailed at the people holding her, trying to get her hands on me. She kept screaming “You!” over and over like I had done something, but all I had done was watch. I was sure of that. I had never gotten two steps past the fence.

Shannon had put her glasses back on. She had the lighter-fluid can in one hand and she took up that long-handled fork in the other. She poked the coals with the fork and sprayed them with the fluid. The can made a popping noise as she squeezed it. She was trying to get more of the coals burning, it seemed. Or maybe she just liked the way the flames leaped up. She sprayed and sprayed, pulled back and sprayed again.

Shannon shook her hand. I heard the lighter-fluid can sputter and suck air. I saw the flame run right up to it and go out. Then it came back with a boom. The can exploded, and fire ballooned out in a great rolling ball.

Shannon didn’t even scream. Her mouth was wide open, and she just breathed the flames in. Her glasses went opaque, her eyes vanished, and all around her skull her fine hair stood up in a crown of burning glory. Her dress whooshed and billowed into orange-yellow smoky flames. I saw the fork fall, the wooden handle on fire. I saw Mrs. Pearl come to her feet and start to run toward her daughter. I saw all the men drop their ice-tea glasses. I saw Shannon stagger and stumble from side to side, then fall in a heap. Her dress was gone. I saw the smoke turn black and oily. I saw Shannon Pearl disappear from this world.